Maybe if everything wasn’t designed to be unrepairable and fragile as fuck this wouldn’t be an issue.
Let’s look at the bright side. Since an appalling percentage of the stuff will either be working, or broken but salvageable, the scavengers might turn it into something useful after the collapse.
I emailed MSI support to get a new hinge for my F key. They repeatedly told me the entire keyboard needed to be replaced. After several days of back and forth, and me assuring the support person that, no I just need the key hinge, and that yes, they could just send me the hinge and I could fix it myself, they relented.
Took 30 seconds and didn’t mean that a perfectly good keyboard be trashed.
do your part, buy old used shit, it’s cheap, good for the environment, and makes you feel good :)
Or just don’t buy new things. That’s my other strategy.
This works for clothes, kitchenware etc. but it’s not the same for tech products. The vast majority of people just want to buy something new that will work for a couple of years. Even cars are less trouble to buy older models and second-hand. This is obviously not an unfixable problem. If everything was designed to be user-repairable, upgradable and with longer support for both software and hardware we’d have less of an issue. But sadly the world runs on capitalism and people have voted with their wallets and gotten us into this mess.
Most people don’t have the time, energy and/or knowledge to make the better choice of getting old and used tech.
idk, i disagree. I do quite a bit of stuff on my workstation, including some video editing. And the only real upgrade i would make to it right now is going to 30 series nvidia, or the AMD equivalent, because linux. And ryzen 5000, because it’s just such a good die process.
Neither of those are new. You could easily buy used hardware in both of those brackets. My current workstation is running a 1070 and an r5 2600. Ancient hardware by todays standards, but perfectly serviceable. Maybe in a laptop? But even then, i have 12 year old laptops, they run fine. They do what i need them to do. And they look great.
You have any specific examples? Phones maybe, they have such a short life cycle it’s not hard to find 2-3 year old flagship selling at a reduced cost these days. I genuinely can’t think of any examples where this wouldn’t happen.
